How To Report and Remove Stolen Articles: Google DMCA Complaint

I was very annoyed at the situation but I followed advice and got it sorted

I reported these thieves to the host websites and Google with a DMCA Form and they were taken down.

Then I forgot about these content thieves and carried on writing articles online

I became complacent and had not checked for stolen articles since before December last year. Then I came across this great article about Content theft the other day.

I decided I had better check to make sure no one had stolen any of my articles lately.

Was I in for a very nasty surprise! There were many of my articles online that had been blatantly copied onto other blogs and websites.

I am sick of people stealing my articles.

These people were even too lazy to take off my HubPages user name and Score which had been copied too. One person had the utter cheek to include my copyright notice at the bottom of my article with the date and my name. At the top of this very same article she had her name as the author!

What I did when I found these stolen articles

I have written comments on these sites to the effect that the article in question was mine and had been stolen.

I have also emailed the administrators of the site to the same effect and the so called author too. And of course I reported them all to Google with a DMCA form. .

I am still waiting for these articles to be removed and as each day goes by I am getting more frustrated and annoyed.

One of my hubs is about setting up a blog. This was stolen on the 20^th December 2011 when it was getting a lot of daily traffic and had a score of 97. Because I did not check for stolen articles until last week I have lost all that revenue.

I realise this is my own fault but really I hate being in a negative mode and expecting other people to be so nasty and dishonest.

I know the world has dishonest and evil people in it who continually create nastiness and seem to get away with it but this has really upset and angered me.

Let’s fight these content thieves

I feel better now after giving myself a good talking to and decided I will fight these content thieves. But to be honest it is very hard when I see all my work of days and weeks writing, researching and editing my hubs go to waste.

It took a while but I realised that if I gave up writing articles online then I would be playing in to the hands of these people. Rather than sit here and be depressed and give up doing something that I love I decided on a plan of action.

The best thing to do would be to try to make our articles on HubPages safer from theft.

HubPages Duplicate Content warning

I understood that if there was a copy of our work on the internet then we would receive a Duplicate Content warning from the HubPages Staff that this was the case. This has either been withdrawn or is not working as well as it should be.

One of my hubs was copied completely including my HubPages user name, score, photos, videos and copyright statement at the end. And other hubs have also been stolen. Why were these not flagged on my account as duplicate content?

I have been in a state of depression over all this. It is so demoralising when I think that the world is full of scumbags like this. But what is worse is the fact they are getting away with it.

I admit I have been complacent and lazy in keeping up to date with my hubs. I should have made it my business to check on a regular basis to see if my hubs were copied and out there some where else.

So I have come up with a poll to see if there is enough hubbers who would agree with me about a way to stop making it easier for these thieves to copy our work on the HubPages writing site.

These people are pure lazy and thieves. My whole articles were copied in full and added to their own blogs and sites. If these thieves were not able to do this then it would stop a lot of content theft straight away.

Would HubPages not be able to activate some kind of software that will stop anyone from being able to copy and paste any hub that has been published on their writing site?

Now the software needed to do this may be too expensive or hard to implement. But there is no harm in making the suggestion to HubPages.

Yes I know writers here would also be unable to copy and paste the hub too. But that would only be from the public page. If hubbers wanted to copy and paste their full article for storage purposes then they can still do this when they go in to the EDIT mode of their hub.

If the article thieves could not copy and paste in full and have to actually copy the hub by typing all the text then I can assure you that a lot of hubs would be protected from content theft!

I would appreciate it if all you readers could take the poll and share this hub with your own followers. That way I will get a better idea of how many writers agree with me about stopping the copy and paste facility here on HubPages to outside readers.

I was just about finished writing an eBook after spending weeks researching and writing it. That is why I have not written and published any hubs lately. It has really put me off publishing this eBook now.

What is the point when anyone can just copy and paste the information online and pass it off as their own! I have been reading quite a few hubs from other writers who have already or are about to publish their own e books.

The general discussion in the comments of these hubs was that yes some e books and their content could be stolen and published online. But most readers suggested that it is not that widespread and they are still planning to write and publish more of their ebooks.

I am not sure whether to go ahead with my own e book now. If I turned it into hubs then at least I would get the revenue from Google Adsense. And I could check for any content theft.

If I publish it and sell a few copies on Amazon it would only take one thieving scumbag to get their hands on it and copy my work as their own.

I would appreciate reader’s thoughts on this issue too. Especially from seasoned ebook publishers and their experience of selling their own books online.

Now I have not gone in to any detail about what you can do to see if any of your articles have been copied and stolen.

Or have I explained what to do when you do find some of your work copied word for word under some one else’s name and site.

A writer here on HubPages has written an excellent hub that explains in every detail what to do so I have given the link here so you can read that article entitled Content Theft.

You can read this hub by ‘writerfox’ by clicking the link above right

This is a major problem that many of our fellow writers here on HubPages are experiencing.

There are quite a few forum discussions going on at the moment about this subject. If you want to read about the thoughts and actions of other hubbers on this article theft then click on this link.

It will bring you directly to the discussion where you can see names of sites that hubbers have posted where their own work has been stolen.

The first post discussed a site that had directly stolen over 4000 hubs from writers here on HubPages. Yes that number is correct! I have since tried to access this site and it has been deleted so the complaints worked.

To read this forum and participate click the link above to the right.

HubPages Learning Center have also created an excellent article about how to go about getting your stolen articles removed from these other blogs and websites.

They go into detail about what you can do and explain how to fill in this complaint form.

There is also a direct link to the form so you can act quickly and get it filled out with the name and details of the content thieves.

They have also given a direct link on this hub if you find that another hubber has stolen your work. Yes it happens. There is an example of one such incident explained in the forum.

This was a person who had already stolen lots of hubs for his blogs and websites and then joined up to HubPages. He was quickly banned. This complaint form to the HubPages staff is also here in this article.

Photo Theft

This was something I must admit I had not thought about. There is a link here too that gives you a way to check that your photographs have not been stolen.

Copyright 2012. L.M.Reid